5. Owner's Manual for the Mind
I will just give a simple understanding about how the mind works and how exactly the Upanishad is going to help us. Let me once more explain the word Upanishad. It means: just sitting. If you want a commentary for that word, I could say: sitting with an enlightened being.
Let us first understand how our mind works with the help of a simple drawing. Your mind is nothing but "making your future into past". Understand: what you call as life is nothing but swallowing your future and making it into past. Am I right? The future becoming past is what you call your mind, or whatever you know as life; nothing else. This diagram is just a time shaft. The space where the future and the past meet is what we call the present moment. The future is just disappearing into the past. Every step of what I am describing, you need to understand completely; only then you will be able to go with it.
A little bit of introduction about the mind is good. It is like an owner"s manual. Owner"s manual for mind! We use the mind without reading the owner"s manual even once. Even in the car, there is information about the airbag, and it says: for further details, see the owner"s manual. How many of us have referred to the owner"s manual about the airbag? With airbags, it is alright to ignore the owner"s manual, because you may feel it is useful only when you have an accident. But if you don"t read the owner"s manual for your mind, you will create accidents! And you will not even know that you are going through accidents every day. That is the problem. So it"s better to have the owner"s manual for the mind.
(points to the board) This is the present moment where the future is disappearing into the past.
Your mind is nothing but a jumping back and forth between past and future. If you just observe your mind for a few minutes, you will understand what exactly I am saying. Thought is nothing but jumping from past to future or future to past. Only when you are shunting between the past and future, you can think. In the present moment, you can"t think. Try to create a single thought in the present moment. You can"t! Either you create a thought or be in the present moment. The two are mutually exclusive. The moment you come to the present moment, thoughts will disappear! Thought, and the present moment are mutually exclusive. If thinking is happening, it means that you are jumping from past to future or future to past. If you are jumping a 100 times from past to future or future to past in one second, you have 100 thoughts per second or 100 TPS for short. Are you able to grasp what I am saying?
If any of you have any doubt, put it down in writing. At the end of the session, I will answer, because this needs to be completely internalized by you. Understand, only if the internalization happens, you will involve yourself in the whole process.
The problem is, you will do all sorts of illogical and nonsensical things for any pleasure, but even to move one finger for spirituality, you will ask one thousand questions. And you think you are very intelligent in doing so. You keep justifying your foolishness by thinking that you are intelligent. That is the problem. Many people come and tell me, "I know that smoking is bad, but I am not able to drop it. What do I do?"
What do I do? I give them honey. I give them a drop of energized honey specially energized for de addiction. Even when your logic says that something is not good, you will do the same thing when it comes to pleasure. But when it comes to meditation or spiritual things, even for a small thing, you will ask so many logical questions. And you think that because your questions are very logical, you are very intelligent. Sometimes, you have the pride, "I don"t believe in superstitious things." You are dangerously unaware of actually how many thousands of nonsensical and superstitious things are there within you. You are the body, is the first superstition that you are carrying! You are not even aware of this! Anyhow, at least now, internalize this, so that you will be ready for the process.
When you are having 100 thoughts per second (TPS), you will be away from the present moment by that proportionate distance. The present moment is where the future and past meet. If you are jumping too many times, which is what is going on now, naturally you will be away from the present. You will never be in the present moment, because in the present moment, you can"t think. There is no space for thoughts in the present moment. If you come back to the present moment, there will only be a beautiful silence. The more number of times you are jumping between the past and the future, the more number of thoughts you will have. 100 TPS means you are completely away from the present moment. You are just not concerned about what is happening in the present. Even if I am standing and talking here, you just pick up one thought, and compare it with all that you have heard in past lectures, discourses, classes, and books, and you remain judgmental about what you hearing now. You will be sitting and having big comparison notes and missing all my statements. That is the problem. See, I am not saying that whatever you heard is wrong, but sitting and analyzing at this time is wrong, because you are missing my continuous flow of statements.
And the problem with so called spiritual seekers is that they are well read, and completely confused! For any statement that I make, they will be sitting and having 10 dictionaries and 10 references and compare my statement with the statements there. They will be doing two things: either they will refer to all those books, and if they find some relationship with what I am saying, they will say, "What he is saying is right," or if they do not find the right quotation or match for my references, they will say, "This is not the right thing. I don"t think he knows the subject fully. He is too young." This is the problem!
See: whether you say "yes" or "no" to my statements, by comparing notes, you are not going to grasp. Even if you say yes, you are going to miss the other statements which I am making. By the time you finish your analysis and come back I would have gone 10 steps ahead.
So for now, just keep all the things which you have read, or studied or heard, in one corner, for two days. When you go back from here, you can pick it up. I am not asking you to completely throw it away. I am only saying, just for two days, go into my words completely, and understand and internalize. If you are jumping between this and that, you will be away from the present.
Sometimes, because of some meditation that you do, because of some technique that you sincerely practice, you might manage to bring down your TPS to say, 80. This means that instead of moving 100 times between the past and future in one second, you move 80 times between the past and the future in one second. You come down a little towards the present moment. If you do work further and reduce the TPS further down to 60, you move a little more to the present moment. Sometimes, very rarely, by powerful techniques or by the blessings of an enlightened Guru, you can bring it down to 20. See, these are just example values. It is not that you are currently in 100 TPS. You are probably in 1000 or 2000 TPS. Or it may even be a million.
One more important thing…please do not sleep! Sleep does not mean zero TPS! Sometimes…in the silence… people wake up. See, my talking sometimes feels like a lullaby, so you feel relaxed and taken care of. When I give a break, suddenly you understand that something is wrong, and you wake up. And the fun part is, when these guys wake up, the first thing that they do is: look at others! If you are looking at others, understand that you are the person who slept, not the others! These people who doze off, they will start with, "Let me listen with closed eyes." They will have the justification, "I am meditating and listening". Soon, the person next to them will see them sitting with closed eyes, and they will nudge them. But these people will not even open their mouth to say, "I am listening", because then, their sleep will be disturbed! They will say, "You attend, you listen, I am ok. I am listening." What to do? I always tell people that "meditative listeners" are the ones who are thinking about something else, or lost somewhere else.
Anyhow, coming back to the subject, rarely, in the presence of a Master, or through some process or some initiation, you come down to 20 TPS. When you come to the present moment, suddenly you will have the intelligence of seeing the future and the past clearly! From a higher TPS point, you can"t see the past or the future clearly. When you come down, you may be able to see a little better. The lower your TPS, the better your vision of the past and future will be. One important thing: now it feels like I am giving you a big promise, but let me tell you: if you come to the present moment, you can see your future so clearly!
Let us analyze one important thing. Sometimes, when you are at a party, suddenly you think that some person is going to appear in the next few minutes… some old friend or some one… and you will see that the person is suddenly there! Or sometimes, when the telephone rings, suddenly you will remember someone who was not there in your memory for the past few years. When you pick up the phone, that person will be on the telephone line! Or when the door bell rings, suddenly you remember a relative who has not come to your home for the past five years or whom you have forgotten for the past five years. When you open the door, you will see him standing there. How many of you have had these kinds of experiences, at least once or twice in your life? So many of you are raising your hands! But when it happens to you, what do you say? You usually call it a coincidence. If it happens in one person"s life once, it can be called coincidence. Am I right? Practically, 98% of you, say that you have had this experience. When 98% of you have had this experience, how can it be called coincidence? You can"t brush this aside in the name of coincidence. Then you will have to change the meaning of the word "coincidence"! Coincidence means rarely, it may or may not happen in one or two person"s lives. But now, the evidence says 98% of the people are experiencing it. There is something more than coincidence in this. This is actually what we call "intuition". It means, when that door bell was ringing, or when that cell phone was ringing, maybe due to a sudden jerk or due to some other reason, your TPS suddenly dropped. TPS can be made to drop even by force sometimes. When the TPS dropped, you were able to see the future, may be the next five minutes of the future clearly. You had a glimpse of the time shaft! That is how you were able to see the person on the other side of the door or phone.
When the TPS drops, you see the future. I think you are able to connect with what I am saying. This is the reason why you will be able to see what is going to come or what is going to happen. See, suddenly, due to the door bell ringing or the cell phone ringing, or probably because you were really relaxed and happy, maybe because in a party, where you don"t have your direct relatives or your in- laws, you were very relaxed…for whatever reason, your TPS suddenly drops. Then, you will have a glimpse of the next five minutes of the future. Just imagine, if your TPS falls down, just accidentally, if you can glimpse the future, if your TPS can be consciously brought down, then understand the value, understand the clarity which can be added to you!
Now, the next few statements which I am going to make, are very mystical. Until now, whatever I said looked very logical, and they are logical, but the next few statements are going to be mystical.
An enlightened person is the person who is established in the present moment, whose energy is in 0 TPS. He is neither lost in the future nor lost in the past. Understand this. The first statement which I am making is: an enlightened person is the person who is established in the present. It means that if you can bring down your TPS and establish yourself in the present, you are enlightened. Second thing: the future, past and present - all these three put together are called 'eternal.' Eternal means 'nithya'. You can touch eternity only in the present moment!